Greg Durbin stands at the corner of Detroit's Clairmount and Rosa Parks Boulevard (formerly 12th Street) Thursday, July 6, 2017. He recalls the 1967 Detroit riot here, where he worked as a member of the city's Tactical Mobile Unit.(Photo: Gillis Benedict/Livingston Daily)

In the early morning hours of July 23, 1967, police raided an unlicensed after-hours club, known as a blind pig, near the corner of Clairmount and 12th Street, which drew a crowd that eventually grew to about 200 people. Accusations of police brutality and racial oppression against black club owners and patrons who were arrested were hurled at police officers, as they arrested 85 people there to celebrate the return of black soldiers from Vietnam.

Around 5 a.m., a son of one of the blind pig's owners picked up a glass bottle and hurled it at a police. Widespread looting, destruction of property, arson and violence followed the incident.

The streets of Detroit during the 1967 riot.(Photo: Tony Spina, Detroit Free Press)

Fifty years after what is referred to as the 1967 Detroit riot or Detroit rebellion, one memory in particular haunts Durbin, now a 75-year-old grandfather from Howell, retired Southfield Police Department lieutenant and trustee of Marion Township.

"We heard bullets on the roof of the scout car," Durbin said.

The police car he was riding in the back of with three other officers had just turned a corner in the vicinity of East Grand Boulevard and Jefferson Avenue on the east side of the city.

As the car stopped, Durbin and other officers rolled out of the police car onto the pavement to get away from gunfire coming from the top floor of a home.

Retired Lt. Greg Durbin was 25 years old and a member of Detroit's Tactical Mobile Unit, working in the middle of the 1967 riot in Detroit. Posing with a riot baton from that time and with a cap representing the Thin Blue Line, Durbin relaxes Wednesday, June 28, 2017, in his Marion Township home.(Photo: Gillis Benedict/Livingston Daily)

Police, including Durbin, fired back.

Then he heard a broadcast over the police radio: "Man down in the alley."

He said, to this day, he doesn't know if his bullets hit the man.

"Our thought was that could have been our shooter," he said.

He said he also doesn't know whether the man lived or died.

"You can't get over that," Durbin said.

'Simmering discontent' catches fire

Herb Boyd, now an author, journalist and black studies instructor, was a young political activist at Wayne State University in 1967, and said he felt "a simmering discontent that had been a part of the African American community for years."

He said although many black Detroiters were optimistic about successes of the civil rights movement, they were also living under oppressive circumstances related to housing, economic inequality along racial lines and other social factors.

Several killings of black individuals such as Cynthia Scott, who was fatally shot by a police officer who was charged but not convicted in 1963, were still fresh in people's minds, he said.

Violence had erupted only two weeks before the 1967 Detroit riot in Newark, New Jersey following the beating by police of black cab driver John Smith.

"National prohibitions have an impact on your community. You're not in a vacuum. People were looking at the situation in Newark and drawing a comparison to the oppressive conditions that lead to it, whether it was housing...police hostility. ...Detroiters were looking at that situation and saying, our situation wasn't all that dissimilar," Boyd said.

"All they needed was just one other incident, like a tinderbox. ...The fuse is the hostility of the police department, and then you need a spark, which was what happened on Clairmount Street," he said.

Greg Durbin, a former member of Detroit's Tactical Mobile Unit during the 1967 riot, talks about the staging area for those officers working the scene in an interview with the Livingston Daily in front of the former Herman Kiefer hospital Thursday, July 6, 2017. Durbin is a trustee with the Marion Township board.(Photo: Gillis Benedict/Livingston Daily)

While Durbin said he does not doubt that instances of police brutality against black people occurred in the city, he said he didn't personally see officers use what he would consider excessive force.

“If there was hostility or things brewing, I noticed very little of it. ...Personally, I did not experience any untoward anger (toward police) or anything that was telling me that you’d better look out because something was going to happen," he said.

He said his perception changed following the riot.

"The people that were victimized the most during the riot in Detroit were the African Americans that lived there, had their homes burned down, lost their businesses. ...Those people treated us OK. They were happy to see us. The other side of that though, the ones that didn't like the cops from the beginning, now they really didn't like us and the barriers were there," he said.

"I still see an expression of language and hostility directed at the police in certain situations...I really don't know if I'll live long enough to see that get better.”

Into the flames

"This is hallowed ground. I haven't stood here for 50 years," Durbin said earlier this month looking through a metal fence at the shuttered Herman Kiefer hospital complex off of the John C. Lodge freeway.

Law enforcement from across the city reported to the now-closed hospital. It was a staging area for police, including Durbin's unit, the Tactical Mobile Unit of the 14th precinct. His unit had been assigned to patrol high crime areas and had been trained in crowd-control.

When he was there 50 years ago, he saw smoke rising over the roof tops coming from the vicinity of 12th Street and Clairmount, where stores and homes were ablaze.

"I'm just a guy who was called into service. I didn't start the fight. We were actually brought in to keep the peace," he said during a moment of self-reflection.

“"I'm just a guy who was called into service. I didn't start the fight. We were actually brought in to keep the peace."”

Greg Durbin

Durbin had been on duty during the Kercheval Street incident, a previous civil disturbance in August 1966, when what he calls "a mini-riot" broke out. But he said that was nothing like what he was thrust into after getting called to duty that Sunday morning in 1967.

Early on, somewhere near the old Olympia Stadium, Durbin remembers standing in a line of police not breaking ranks, as crimes were being committed around him.

"The crowds were running around. I mean, it was nuts. The police were in a formation. We were in a line. ...I mean, right in front of us, some guy would kick out a plate glass window and go in and get something. And originally, they really put some serious restraints on the police for a very short period of time. There was an effort made by the political powers to maybe not let this thing get out of hand," he said.

He said when his unit was first issued shotguns, officers were told not to load them.

Police officers were ordered to "not over-engage" with people committing crimes, he said.

"As this thing started to stretch out ... a lot of that changed. The typical formations were no longer used. ... Now, you're dealing with snipers on a rooftop that are shooting at you, and you're dealing with firemen on their hook and ladders trying to put a fire out and some guy on the street is shooting at the firemen," he said.

Late Monday night, martial law was declared and troops of the U.S. Army 101st and 82nd Airborne were called in.

Durbin remembers Army troop transfer trucks rolling slowly through the streets, as police filled them up with people they were arresting.

"At a point in time, we're making a lot of arrests. We're sweeping the streets. We're getting people that are committing crimes, that are doing the looting and the burning. ...The Army trucks would move very slowly down the streets, and you would take your arrests and deposit that individual in the back of the Army truck," he said.

Durbin saw the garage at the 10th Precinct full of prisoners, "shoulder to shoulder," he said.

"As chaotic as things were, the Detroit Police Department at the time did a commendable job of keeping that department under control. (Police officers) knew what they were expected to do," he said. "I always knew what I should be doing and where I should be doing it."

'I didn't see him for days'

With very little sleep, the first couple days of the riot, Durbin was shipped off from one area of the city to another as new areas would heat up, he said.

"I maybe showered Tuesday," he said, also saying that while he went home to his wife a few times to sleep, in all the chaos, he couldn't tell you when or for how long.

The young patrolman's wife, Barbara Durbin, was pregnant with their first child, a son.

"You heard about the fires, arrests and shootings on radio and TV. But I didn't know where he was, which was scary," she said. "I didn't see him for days."

Her sister and brother-in-law came and stayed with her while her husband was out on duty in the thick of it. Once in a while, he called her from pay phones and let her know he was still alive.

"It wasn't a good time in the history of Michigan in Detroit. I don't like to talk about it. It was just not good," she said.

After the five days of civil unrest ended, many older police officers starting talking about retiring and the younger ones had big decisions to make, Greg Durbin said.

"That city was no longer going to be the same as it was, and you have to make a decision whether or not you want to be part of that. ... I knew I didn't want to go through an experience like that again," he said.

About a year later, Durbin transferred to the Southfield Police Department, where he worked until his retirement in 1995.